"Other than you threatening to kill me with sex?" Ryouma tried a teasing grin, but couldn't make it any further than a grimace. The bad joke sounded even worse under the cold grey sky than it had inside his own head. And while Kakashi might have only been asking out of idle curiosity--or, more likely, as a desperate attempt at diverting attention--the Copy Ninja deserved the same honesty Ryouma had demanded from him.

Nothing you can fix, Kakashi had said, and Ryouma didn't believe that any more than he believed they were both going to live to a ripe and decrepit old age. He was pretty sure opening up old wounds wouldn't fix anything, but maybe honesty would.

"Knew a girl once," he said, and corrected himself. "Loved a girl, once. Takamichi Misao. I only learned her family name afterwards... She had the longest black hair, and she smiled like the sun coming out. I was seventeen. Chuunin. She was twenty. She was my first second time." He chewed the inside of his cheek, glancing away over the broken, jumbled expanse of roofs stretching out all the way to the Hokage Monument. "We'd--been together maybe a month when we got a mission together. She might've asked it for a favor; the guys in the mission office all-- Well. She let me stay over at her place the night before."

This time he did manage a faint grin, quirked sideways by the memory of lust. "You remember being seventeen. And she was probably just as horny as me, if you can believe that. We got the mission done, anyway. Still in Grass Country, coming back, but she said it'd be all right, and I--"

He'd been a fool. Seventeen years old, and trying to patch up the pieces of his broken heart after Hitomi-sensei had dropped it with such disdain. And then Misao had smiled at him, and flirted back, and ran her clever hands up under his shirt when he kissed her...

He'd never tasted alcohol, but he'd been drunk on the taste of her, on the touch of her hands and the scent of her hair, on the heady sensation of someone who wanted him. And lust drowned sense as readily as liquor did, because when she'd pulled him down into the long grass without even setting a bunshin to scout or a trap to ward, he'd gone willingly.

And gotten her killed.

"I brought her tags back, for her mother," he said quietly. "Swore after that I'd never take it out of the village. I kept that promise pretty well, so far."

He'd kept the promise to himself about not letting anyone else get too close pretty well, too--until now.